"The time has not come,"
they said; "wait a century or two." Some opposed it on the ground that it
would bring to London a host of foreigners, with foreign ideas and
perilous to English morals and religion.
In the garden of a certain grand English country-place there is a certain
summer-house with a closed door, which, if a curious visitor opens, lets
off some water-works, which give him a spray-douche. So the Prince
received, at door after door, a dash of cold water for his "foreign
enterprise." But he persevered, letting nothing dishearten him--toiling
terribly, and inspiring others to toil, till at last the site he desired
for the building was granted him, and the first Crystal Palace--the first
palace for the people in England--went slowly up, amid the sun-dropped
shades of Hyde Park. Temporary as was that marvelous structure, destined
so soon to pass away, like "the baseless fabric of a vision," I can but
think it the grandest of the monuments to the memory of the Prince-
Consort, though little did he so regard it. To his poetic yet practical
mind it was the universal temple of industry and art, the valhalla of the
heroes of commerce, the fane of the gods of science--the caravansery of
the world.
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